Cybercrime and Digital Criminology: Lecture 8

CRIM20007:

CYBERCRIME AND

DIGITAL CRIMINOLOGY

ONLINE

DIGILANTISM

HASHTAG ACTIVISM

WEAPONISED VISIBILITY

MOTIVATIONS

• Evidence and witness gathering

• Awareness and activism

• Creating and constructing new personal spaces for healing

• Demanding formal justice attention and action

• Attempting to garner support from a sympathetic audience

Thompson et al. (2016: 3)

• Moncada (2017, p. 408): vigilantism is the ‘the collective use or threat of extra-legal violence in response to an alleged criminal act’.

• ‘Of the core elements discussed by both Johnston (1996) and Moncada (2017), digilantism might well be (i) collective and to some extent premeditated, even organised; and it may also be (ii) enacted by autonomous citizens or at least individuals acting in their private capacity. However, not all collective actions popularly understood as digilantism necessarily involve (iii) the use, or threat of, physical violence or acts of force; and nor are all infractions that attract the response of digilantes necessarily criminal.’

- Powell et al. (2018: 141)

• Movements facilitated by a hashtag

• Have a horizontal, rather than vertical structure

• Examples:
• Me Too Movement
• Black Lives Matter
• #YesAllWomen
• #Kony2012
• #icebucketchallenge

• Research: Bonilla and Rosa (2015), Khoja-Moolji (2015), Yang (2016), Williams (2015), Stache (2015), and Clark (2016)

• Trottier (2017) = digilantism as 'weaponised visibility'

‘The principals of virality that hashtags necessarily operationalize meant that in the case of #OPRollRedRoll and #OccupySteubenville both feminist zeal and vigilante fervor were magnified and, at times, applied indiscriminately. The Steubenville case suggests that once a collective mass aligns itself behind a hashtag, there may be little time left for cautious, reasoned deliberation. A campaign’s precise targeting mechanism may be compromised in favor of broad, public exposure and mass action’

- Heather Suzanne Woods (2014: 1097)

INFORMAL

FIVE-MINUTE BREAK

#METOO

• A hashtag movement movement against sexual assault and sexual harassment.

'Suggested by a friend: ‘If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ As a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet’

- Alysa Milano (2017: np)

• Research: Mendes et al. (2018), Tippett (2018), Wexler et al. (2019), Fileborn and Loney-Howes (2019)

COUNTERPUBLICS

LECTURE OUTLINE

ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME

• Counterpublics: ‘discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses’ (Fraser 1990: 67).

• For Fraser (2009), injustice is comprised of:
• Maldistribution (unequal distribution of economic resources),
• Misrepresentation (disparity in political participation)
• Misrecognition (institutionalised patterns of unequal cultural value)

• Powell (2015: 581): ‘the people’s court of new and social media’ offers counterpublics where women can be heard and supported in ways not provided by the formal criminal justice system

PREVENTION QUIZ

• Forms of online informal justice
• Hashtag activism
• Digilantism
• Counterpublics
• Viral justice
• Rhizomatic justice
• Doxing as digilantism

• Challenges and criticisms of online justice-seeking
• Trial by social media
• Loss of due process

Go to www.menti.com and use the code 65 74 33

JUSTICE

VIRAL JUSTICE

• A form of online shaming.

• Internet virality: ‘a social information flow process where many people simultaneously forward a specific information item, over a short period of time, within their social networks, and where the message spreads beyond their own networks to different, often distant networks, resulting in a sharp acceleration in the number of people who are exposed to the message’ (Nahon and Hemsley 2013: 16).

• Viral justice aims at obtaining ‘remediation by remediation’: justice procured through an online post ‘going viral’ and being viewed, shared, and re-mediated by large numbers of social media users (Wood et al. 2018).

• A product of the re-centralisation of the Internet and the 'like economy' of social media.

DOXING AS DIGILANTISM

DOXING

SWARMS AND RHIZOMATIC JUSTICE

• 'A mainstream tool in the culture wars' - Bowles (2017: np)

• Marwick (2013) = doxing as a regulatory mechanism targeting individuals who perpetrate hate speech on the Internet anonymously or pseudonymously.

• Colton et al. (2017) = doxing as a ‘tactical technical communication’, and a ‘tactical practice’ (de Derteau 1984) used against White supremecists (think Anonymous' doxing of KKK members).

• Politically-motivated doxing, which they examine through the lens of feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s (2009) ‘ethics of care’.

• However ... doxing is also used extensively as a form of coercive control by intimate partner abusers (Dragiewicz et al. 2018; Freed et al. 2018)

• ‘In swarms there is no central command, no unit or agent which is able to survey, oversee and control the entire swarm. Yet the actions of the swarm are directed, the movement motivated, and the pattern has a purpose. This is the paradox of swarms’ - Thacker (2004: np).

• Rhizomatic (or rhizomantic) justice - Powell et al. (2018)

• The figure of the rhizome emphasises non-hierarchical, leaderless and heterogenous forms of thought and social action (Deleuze and Guattari 2004)

• On social media, then, the arborescent (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) and the rhizomatic are equally at work in justice seeking.

• Doxing: ‘the intentional public release onto the Internet of personal information about an individual by a third party, often with the intent to humiliate, threaten, intimidate, or punish the identified individual’ (Douglas 2016: 199).

• Three forms:

• Deanonymizing doxing: loss of anonymity.

• Targeting doxing: loss of obscurity.

• Delegitimizing doxing: loss of credibility.

• Identity knowledge: information that, if known, precludes the perfect anonymity of an individual (Marx 1999).

DR. MARK WOOD: mark.wood@unimelb.edu.au

TRIAL BY (SOCIAL) MEDIA

• What is the justice of viral justice? When we talk about online informal justice, what, sort of justice are we referring to? (see Walklate 2019).

• Trial by media: the practice of (news) media creating a sense of an individual’s guilt before, and sometimes after, the case has been tried in a court of law (Greer & McLaughlin 2011).

• Trial by social media?
• ''Trial by social media' worry in Meagher case'

- Lowe (2012: np)

• ''Trial by social media' to be examined as Attorney General says justice must join the 'modern world'

- Rudgard (2017: np)

CHALLENGES

• Victims loss of control of their narrative.

• The impossibility of removing the image from websites and the consequences this may have for victims in the future.

• Exposure of the victim to further harm online.

• Impinging upon achievement of justice through traditional means

• Creating hierarchies of harm
• Žižek (2007): subjective vs. objective violence

• Hindering productive forms of activism

• Might lead to disproportionate ‘punishments’ (Kosseff, 2016)

Thompson et al. (2016: 6-7)

NO LECTURES

NEXT WEEK

Have a great non-teaching period and good luck with your first assessment!

REFERENCES

Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). # Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4-17.

Bowles N (2017) How ‘Doxxing’ Became a Mainstream Tool in the Culture Wars. The New York Times, Aug.30. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/technology/doxxing-protests.html [Last accessed 27/08/2019]

Cavarero, A. (2011). Horrorism: Naming contemporary violence. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Clark, R. (2016). “Hope in a hashtag”: the discursive activism of# WhyIStayed. Feminist Media Studies, 16(5), 788-804.

Colton, J. S., Holmes, S., & Walwema, J. (2017). From noobguides to# OpKKK: Ethics of anonymous’ tactical technical communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 26(1), 59-75.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus. London, UK: Continuum.

Douglas, D. M. (2016). Doxing: a conceptual analysis. Ethics and information technology, 18(3), 199-210.

Dragiewicz, M., Burgess, J., Matamoros-Fernández, A., Salter, M., Suzor, N. P., Woodlock, D., & Harris, B. (2018). Technology facilitated coercive control: domestic violence and the competing roles of digital media platforms. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 609-625.

Fileborn, B., & Loney-Howes, R. (eds.) #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.

Fraser, N. (2009). Social justice in the age of identity politics. Geographic thought: A praxis perspective, 72-91.

Freed, D., Palmer, J., Minchala, D., Levy, K., Ristenpart, T., & Dell, N. (2018, April). “A Stalker's Paradise”: How Intimate Partner Abusers Exploit Technology. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 667). ACM.

Greer, C., & McLaughlin, E. (2011). Trial by media’: Policing, the 24-7 news mediasphere and the ‘politics of outrage. Theoretical Criminology, 15(1), 23-46.

Khoja-Moolji, S. (2015). Becoming an “intimate publics”: Exploring the affective intensities of hashtag feminism. Feminist Media Studies, 15(2), 347-350.

Kosseff, J. (2016). The hazards of cyber-vigilantism. Computer Law & Security Review, 32(4), 642-649.

Lowe, A. (2012). “Trial by Social Media” Worry in Meagher Case. The Age, 28.

Marx, G. T. (1999). What’s in a name? Some reflections on the sociology of anonymity. The Information Society, 15(2), 99–112.

Marwick, A. (2013). There’s No Justice Like Angry Mob Justice: Regulating Hate Speech through Internet Vigilantism. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 3.

Mendes, K., Ringrose, J., & Keller, J. (2018). # MeToo and the promise and pitfalls of challenging rape culture through digital feminist activism. European Journal of Women's Studies, 25(2), 236-246.

Moncada, E. (2017). Varieties of vigilantism: conceptual discord, meaning and strategies. Global Crime, 18(4), 403-423.

Nahon, K., & Hemsley, J. (2013). Going viral. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Powell, A. (2015). Seeking rape justice: Formal and informal responses to sexual violence through technosocial counter-publics. Theoretical Criminology, 19(4), 571-588.

Powell, A., Stratton, G., & Cameron, R. (2018). Digital criminology: Crime and justice in digital society. London, UK: Routledge.

Stache, L. C. (2015). Advocacy and political potential at the convergence of hashtag activism and commerce. Feminist Media Studies, 15(1), 162-164.

Thacker, E. (2004). Networks, Swarms, Multitudes (Part Two). CTheory, 5-18.

Thompson, C., Wood, M., & Rose, E. (2016, July). Viral justice: Survivor-Selfies, Internet virality and justice for victims of intimate partner violence. In British Society of Criminology 2016 Conference: Inequalities in a Diverse World (pp. 6-8).

Tippett, E. C. (2018). The Legal Implications of the MeToo Movement. Minn. L. Rev., 103.

Walklate, S. (2019). Living in La La Land. Justice Alternatives.

Wexler, L., Robbennolt, J. K., & Murphy, C. (2019). # MeToo, Time's up, and Theories of Justice. U. Ill. L. Rev., 45.

Williams, S. (2015). Digital defense: Black feminists resist violence with hashtag activism. Feminist Media Studies, 15(2), 341-344.

Wood, M., Rose, E., & Thompson, C. (2018). Viral justice? Online justice-seeking, intimate partner violence and affective contagion. Theoretical Criminology, 23(3).

Woods, H. S. (2014). Anonymous, Steubenville, and the politics of visibility: Questions of virality and exposure in the case of# OPRollRedRoll and# OccupySteubenville. Feminist Media Studies, 14(6), 1096-1098.

Yang, G. (2016). Narrative agency in hashtag activism: The case of# BlackLivesMatter. Media and Communication, 4(4), 13.

Žižek, S. (2007). Violence: Six sideways reflections. London, UK: Verso.